Fall of Cybertron Tomorrow/War For Cybertron Today

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I suspect Peter Cullen could tell me he’d just murdered my mother, eaten my cat in a sandwich and set fire to my feet and I’d feel impossibly comforted, just so long as he did it in his Optimus Prime voice. It’s that and many more giant robot-based, entirely unbreakable associations with childhood joy and wonder which means I’m excited to a slightly alarming degree about the sequel to a distinctly average action game. Launch trailer below, and, perhaps more usefully, some details on how to make the previous game, War For Cybertron, a whole lot less bland.
Ad hominem swipes aside, I returned to Transformers: War For Cybertron last week to refresh my memory ahead of this week’s Fall of Cybertron, and it did seem more peppy than I’d remembered it to be.

What helped hugely with that were three mini-mods that unlocked the framerate and FOV, which were otherwise clamped down to a sluggish 30fps and stifling tunnel vision respectively, brightened up some of specular highlighting, sharpened textures and upped physics effects, and introduced anti-aliasing (instructions at that last link do work despite being for a completely different game). Bit of a fiddle to get it all in there, but once done it was done and resulted in a game that didn’t feel like anywhere near such a sombre, treacly trudge. Couldn’t stop the final boss fight from being a waking nightmare, of course.

As a high-speed robo-action game with what were now reasonably dramatic and crisps vistas, Cybetron became a far more agreeable tourist destination. I encourage you to check those tweaks out if you already own the game, they do make a surprising degree of difference for such weeny alterations. Here’s a screenshot I took with everything on – click for a 720p version. Can’t turn the colours up, sadly, but it’s a lot sharper and more distinct.

Hopefully Fall of Cybertron PC will be spared such sins – with the PC port having been passed to a dedicated second dev rather than being left as an afterthought for High Moon, my hopes are fairly high. As for the game itself, the recent console demo didn’t suggest a huge departure from WFC but did seem a bit more high-budget, while the wide range of promised characters would seem to imply greater variety. Anyway! VERY DRAMATIC launch trailer below. Unlike WFC, it has colours, which I’m very excited about.

In a break from miserable, pointless, monopolising tradition, the PC version of Fall of Cybertron in the UK looks as though it will be available day and date, via Steam, with the US release tomorrow. Stinky console-folk will have to wait until Friday. Who would have thought Activsion, of all people, would be the ones to get with the digitally-distributed, no-oceans times, daddio?

a.) Galvatron was voiced by Leonard ‘pure gravelly-voiced awesome’ Nimoy in the movie*.
b.) He straight up murders that whiny little bitch Starscream upon his return to the Decepticons.
c.) He transforms into a space gun. A space gun.

’nuff said.

*That’s right, the movie. There was only one movie and it was made in the 80s.

Wow, a lot of love for Galvatron around here. Maybe it’s a British thing?

Anyway, for me Galvatron and his ilk of “the” movie corresponded with the end of my childhood love affair with the Transformers, so besides being an ugly purple guy, he does nothing for me (with the significant caveat that the Nimoy thing is admittedly pretty cool. But, c’mon, Orson Wells in his last role? That trumps Nimoy.)

Besides, he killed Starscream, my favourite. That takes a few decades to get over.